MY PAGES

Monday, December 17, 2012

A Conversation with Adam Mansbach

Q: In
the acknowledgments you thank a number of actual graffiti artists. How did you
forge connections with this community?

A: Over many years. I wrote this book as an outgrowth of those
relationships, rather than the other way around. When I got into hip-hop,
around 1986, all the artistic elements were of a piece: the verbal (rhyming),
the sonic (deejaying), the kinetic (b-boying), and the visual (graff). I was
mainly an MC and a DJ, but you had to be conversant in all those forms and
understand the ways they connected aesthetically. So I wrote a little bit—took
tags, tried my hand at piecing under the names JUST and EASEL.

I wasn’t a natural at graffiti, but I became a connoisseur. The
way it dealt with flow and rupture, the intricate rules and mores of the art
and the competition, the interplay between creation and destruction—all that
fascinated me. And graff writers were usually the most interesting hip-hoppers:
the weirdos, the mad scientists, the guerillas, the theorists, the addicts.
They’d invented this thing that made them outlaws, that they pursued at their
own risk, strictly for fame and satisfaction. There’s a beautiful purity to it.
So I made myself a student of its colorful, often apocryphal history, and got to
know as many writers as I could, including legends like PHASE 2 and ZEPHYR and
PART ONE.

By the time I conceived of this book, those friendships were
solid. Before I started writing, I remember, I took KET ONE out to lunch and
told him I needed to know whether it would be possible to paint every train in
the NYC subway system in one night, and if so, how it could be done. He leaned
across the table and said, “I’ve been thinking about this for twenty years.”

Q: It
seems that graffiti has existed for as long as there has been written culture;
there are even ancient Roman examples of graffiti, often of the type found in a
bathroom stall. What accounts for the enduring appeal of writing graffiti?

A: The purity of the statement. It’s literature in its rawest
form: a simple declaration of existence, adorned and armored and fractured and
stylized in every imaginable way. It’s no coincidence that modern graffiti
culture developed around the name, or that the practitioners call themselves
writers. Graffiti is narrative; it tells a story, if you know where to look.

Q: You
write in a number of different genres, including poetry and your bestselling
children’s book parody, Go the
F**k to Sleep. Is
there a particular medium that you feel most comfortable in? Were you expecting
that the parody would be the success that it was? What was that experience
like?

A: No, I wasn’t expecting that book to take off and sell a million
copies; I was just tickled that I got to publish it. The experience was crazy;
I literally did eight hours of interviews every single day for six months, and
I’ve got far too many wacky stories to get into here, from the New Zealand
censorship battle to my face-off with Dr. Ferber.

At heart, I’ll always be a novelist, and an MC. But the nice thing
is that compared to the heavy lifting of a novel—the time, the commitment, the
word count, the world-creation—everything else feels relatively light . . .
which is not to say that I’m good at it, just that it takes a lot out of me.
But I’ve been doing more screenwriting lately, and I find that a joy. Poetry is
always fun. Genre fiction, which is new to me, is a blast, too. I like to work
within parameters sometimes—the strictures of meter and rhyme, or the
imperative to end each chapter with a cliffhanger—because it’s a fun challenge
to create inside these constraints.

Q:From the first page, the novel is written in
the vernacular of the graffiti crew, and the reader either understands it,
appreciates it, and follows it or he doesn’t. Was there ever a concern that the
language might be an impediment for some readers?

A: I was only concerned with getting the voice right. And I don’t
see it as particularly inaccessible—I mean, it’s English, and it’s
grammatically correct. Yes, Dondi mashes up slang and high cultural classicism,
so maybe some readers won’t get the Greek mythology references and others won’t
know some hip-hop touchstones. But that kind of easy, flowing multilinguistic
pastiche is how he gets down—how a whole lot of people I know get down. His
signposts are as legitimate and mainstream as any other set, they’re just
underrepresented in literature. The way I was taught to approach books at my
fancy Ivy League college is that if you don’t understand something, you do the
work of figuring it out. You look up the obscure reference, or the Spanish
word, and you learn something. Language is changing all the time, after all.

Q: New York City is more
than the setting for the novel—it’s a mythic presence; the novel could not take
place in any other city. Why does New
York hold this sway over people?

A: Because it’s a festering, majestic shithole full of compressed
energy and dreams and tension and innovation. At the population density of Manhattan, you could fit the world’s population into the
state of Texas.
Put people from all over the world on top of each other like that and some fly
shit is bound to pop off. In terms of this book, New York is the nexus of graffiti culture,
the birthplace of hip-hop. There’s an exceptionalism that goes with that—sometimes
it sours into provincialism, but often it just gives New Yorkers an unmatched
wit and swagger.

Q: In
the 1970s and 1980s, New York was a dark and foul place, riddled with crime,
urban squalor, and, of course, graffiti. Some people, including those in the
novel, feel that this period was the “true” New York,
as opposed to what they perceive as the gentrified, sanitized New York of today. On pages 216–217, Dondi
admits seeing both sides of this issue but declines to argue for either. What
is your opinion?

A: It’s important not to romanticize the governmental neglect,
institutional racism, and other insidious factors that created the climate
you’re talking about. The circumstances out of which graffiti and hip-hop rose
were deplorable, and represent failed policies on a municipal and a national
level. That said, to position gentrification as the opposite creates a false
dichotomy. There are losers and winners in gentrification, and the losers are
the same people who lost in the ’70s—the poor and disenfranchised. We have to
look at whether gentrification lifts everybody’s quality of life, or just makes
a neighborhood uninhabitable by its longtime residents. Ditto the “sanitized” New York: that process
mirrors a national trend toward record-setting levels of incarceration. We’ve
moved from the politics of abandonment to the politics of containment, but
neither one is worth celebrating.

Q:
Your narrator Dondi isn’t shy about sharing opinions on actual people and
events. For example, the book Tuesdays
with Morrie receives
a few less than flattering comments. Were you concerned that you might offendanyone?

A: No. I’m writing in a voice, and the novel succeeds or fails on
the authenticity and humor and heart of that voice. Dondi is a sharp,
shit-talking eighteen-year-old stoner, and I was having too much fun to rein
him in at all. Generally speaking, I think honesty of the sort that underwrites
good literature is incompatible with worrying about causing offense. Plus,
Mitch Albom’s probably not gonna read this book.

Q:When describing the
time-traveling properties of the apartment stairs, Dondi says that if the
readers arehoping for magical realism, then they should
move on to a different book. However, magical realism isusually defined as a narrative style in which fantastical
elements appear in a reality-based context. Doesn’tthat description fit Dondi’s supernatural staircase or the
possibility of supernatural forces in the subwaytunnels?

A: Yeah, but he still rejects the term—because he considers it corny,
and “literary,” and his life is real. Personally, I was interested in thinking
about what a contemporary, New York
magic realism would look like. You know, we read Márquez and understand that
his magic realism is grounded in the religion of Colombia, or we read Murakami and
understand that his version is based in Japanese myth and culture...but we
don’t have any such framework in this country. So for me, what it looks like is
that the incidents of “magic” don’t go unremarked upon. Rather, they have to be
defended and debated, and when you tell somebody about them, the reaction is
usually like, “get the fuck outta here with that bullshit.”

Q: Are
there any classic New York
films or novels that influenced you when writing RAGE IS BACK?

A: I’d say that the biggest literary influences on this novel were
Rule of the Bone by Russell Banks, 2666 by
Roberto Bolano, and maybe Treasure
Island. But the music of New York City—from classic hip-hop toNuyorican
salsa to jazz—is always with me in an important way, no matter what I’m working
on.

Q:
Late in the novel, Dondi describes the process of writing his book as “Fake it
till you make it, as they say. Keep sitting in that chair” (page 288). Is that
your own approach to writing?

A: The “keep sitting in the chair” part, for sure. I’m happy to
say that I don’t feel like I’m faking it anymore. Although that probably means
I’m faking it.

Q:
What is your next project? Are you working in different genres simultaneously?

A: I have a supernatural thriller called The
Dead Run coming out in July—my first genre novel. I’m supposed to do a
second, too; that one is called Blood Alcohol Content. I’ve
got about three movie projects in various stages of development, too, including
a script I got to workshop last year at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and
another that Jim Jarmusch is executive producing.

MORE LINKS

IN THEIR WORDS

"Would you not like to try all sorts of lives--one is so very small--but that is the satisfaction of writing--one can impersonate so many people. " Katherine Mansfield

AMBIGUOUS CHEKHOV

"I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.''

"Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all."

"Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience."